Z-1 Robot
The goal of the project is to create a mobile autonomous robot. Also I wanted to
simplify the development process and make it fast and cheap.
To accomplish these goals, a mobile phone with Java support is used. Also, an
RC-toy is used as a mechanical base for the robot to simplify construction. The
toy provides a carcass and two motors with gearboxes.
I have developed a robot control board. It is based on a microcontroller unit
(MCU – like very, very simple computer) – AVR ATmega32. The microcontroller is
programmed in the C language. MCU is used to drive motors and to collect data
(measurements) from various sensors. A temperature sensor (DS18B20) is
available now, and I’m working on integration of infrared (IR) based obstacles
detectors and an accelerometer sensor. The future plans include adding support
for ultrasonic range-finders, electronic compass and other sensors.
MCU is connected to a mobile phone over the standard serial port (COM-port,
almost the same as in the desktop computers). Modern mobile phones are powerful
enough for some robotics experiments. The mobile phone is used as a
computational and communicational device in the robot. It is programmed in Java
Mobile Edition (JME). This "of-the-shelve" component makes it easy to implement
many important features (such as, Bluetooth communications, etc).
Z-1 robot can work in two modes:
-
be remotely controlled by operator
-
be autonomous
The autonomous mode is currently being in development. In this mode, a special
program on the mobile phone receives sensor measurements from the
microcontroller over serial port, analyzes it (for example, to avoid obstacles)
and sends robot movement commands back to the microcontroller.
The remotely controlled mode is implemented. A pocket computer (PDA) is used as
the operator remote control device. It is very portable and provides a touch
screen to implement a cool user interface. The operator control program is also
written in Java (IBM J9 JVM), it communicates with the mobile phone over the
Bluetooth connection. It allows sending commands to control robot movements and
to receive measurements from the sensors.
Structure of the Z-1 robotic system
The robot is still being developed, but I already got some nice results. It is
interesting to try to control robot over the Internet. At the moment GPRS is a
bit slow (lag) for such “real-time” tasks, but EDGE/EV-DO and Wi-Fi seem very
promising. Mobile phones also can provide camera support, a lot of storage
space on a memory card, speaker support and so on. All these are useful for
robotics experiments.
You can view slides about the project here.
Below you can see some pictures of the Z-1 robot.
Original RC-toy
RC-toy opened and some additional connectors are soldered
Z-1 Robot currently
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Org.Ua